Monday, October 8, 2018

TOP-5 FEATURES OF THE NEXT CONFERENCE

The 5th anniversary celebration will bring surprises for participants. In 2018 Participants had a chance to play a game, collect stickers and get prizes (for example one girl got a parachute jumping session as a prize, we hope to see her safe during RDD 2019 :). This year we are preparing more prizes and games for the participants.

The program with be focused on Backend Development and DevOps. We are already contacting the speakers and are proud to announce that the program will be really strong. However, we are not fixed only on the rockstar speakers. For us, the priority is that the people from the Baltic States come forward. Thus anyone can submit the talk on Call for Papersand we’ll consider it along with the program committee and the community.

This will be a conference for the community, which is organized by the community. Latvian IT sphere doesn’t develop fast, we still don’t have any IT specialized online platform or a chat. And we’ll try to do it with the RDD Telegram channel. The participants will have a space to vote for talks, influence the schedule. Any interested person can easily join the community and participate in the RDD organization.

We will enhance the communication during the conference with discussion zones and an afterparty. Plus we plan to automate a part of networking with application for questioning the speakers. Of course an online application can not replace offline communication but we hope it’ll break some barriers for asking questions. Sometimes we get a feedback that conferences are useless, the whole content can be found on the internet. And it’s true, no reason to argue that there are not many advantages of a conference in comparison to tons of online courses on the internet. But conference is not just a long youtube video. Good Networking and a chance to talk to experts and colleagues is one of the core features of the conference.

We expect more people in 2019. And we are glad to see more and more women at the conference. When we started there were just a few, now it’s around 20%. We expect about 700 people, so the networking and the afterparty gotta be spectacular :)

Sunday, September 16, 2018

A robot is a great tool to show what the programming can do. In the talk Oleksandra shared experience of making several different projects with kids of different age using a BB-8 robot. She inspire kids to program, having just a Mobile device and robot